Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis may not have officially announced he’s running for president, but his schedule sure looks like it. On Monday, DeSantis made a whirlwind tour of several blue-state cities and suburbs to contrast the Sunshine State with “woke” metroplexes like NYC, particularly when it comes to law-and-order issues.

In New York, as well as the Chicago and Philadelphia suburbs, DeSantis received a warm welcome from local Republicans who say that Florida’s declining crime rate is a sign that the state and its elected leaders are doing the right thing.

Mr. DeSantis’s message resonated with New Yorkers who are frustrated about a rise in major crimes, said Joseph Borelli, the City Council’s Republican minority leader, who attended the event, at the restaurant Privé.

“His message was simple — that Florida has hit a 50-year low in crime because they haven’t enacted policies like bail reform and defund the police,” he said. “Every time you open a newspaper, they’re talking about crime in New York and other big progressive cities.”

Experts have questioned how substantially crime has decreased in Florida because data for 2021 was released as law enforcement agencies moved to a new F.B.I. methodology for collecting such statistics.

I had to include that bit of snarky reporting from the New York Times because of how absurdly silly it is. Yes the FBI has started using new methodology that has led to some agencies across the country not reporting data at all, but Florida’s crime rate has been steadily falling for decades, not just for the past year or two. Since the late 1980s both the homicide and overall violent crime rate have declined by nearly 50%, while the state has continued to protect and strengthen the Second Amendment rights of residents.

Unsurprisingly, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has a real problem with the fact that Florida’s become a safer state without trying to infringe on the fundamental right to keep and bear arms.

Adams latest barbs against DeSantis, who visited Staten Island to speak at a law enforcement confab Monday, were based on what the mayor described as a “philosophical disagreement.”

“All of us believe that people should have the right to safety, and I support that and I’m happy to know that he believes that as well,” Adams said, referring to DeSantis. “But you have to back that up and not support the over-proliferation of guns in our country that is harming far too many New Yorkers.”

A right to safety? It’s a lovely idea, but the truth is there’s no such thing any more than we have an inherent right to happiness or financial security. The right of armed self-defense, on the other hand, is real, and it’s spectacular. It’s also one that Adams and his anti-2A allies in New York have been hellbent on obliterating in the wake of the Supreme Court decision striking down the state’s unconstitutional “may issue” carry laws.

It’s not the “over-proliferation of guns” that’s harming New Yorkers. Its flesh-and-blood, living, breathing, human beings who are committing these acts of violence, and its the mayor’s party in New York that’s taken a soft approach to dealing with violent criminals; choosing instead to come down hard on the state’s responsible gun owners and engaging in massive resistance to any recognition of our fundamental right to keep and bear arms while repeat, violent, felons are given slaps on the wrist when they show up in court.

Frankly, I’m kind of glad that Adams brought up his “philosophical differences” with DeSantis on gun ownership. If nothing else, his asinine comments are a reminder that while Florida and the majority of other states recognize the right to keep and bear arms New York is leading the way in criminalizing it at every turn; something that helps to explain both New York’s population loss and Florida’s status as the fastest-growing state in the nation.